The conversation is happening. It’s not just HoopIdea making it happen. It’s Jeff Van Gundy, Phil Jackson, Bill Simmons. And it’s fans, fans and more fans. As soon as HoopIdea opened the door to the conversation about how the game could be better, fans streamed in with thousands of ideas and emails supporting the effort.

The NBA itself has weighed in extensively, mostly in quiet conversations. And even if the league hasn’t enacted every change it could, league officials have been thoughtful and open to discussing how to improve the game. They get it.

As NBA fans, we can have whatever game we want. The more we examine the game and talk about it, the more it becomes clear where the NBA’s focus should be -- on basketball.

SPEED UP THE GAMEThis was the original HoopIdea -- what’s with all the delays? Too much dead-ball time. It’s still a problem, but how gratifying to hear from NBA vice president of basketball operations Stu Jackson, about five minutes into this February video, that “not having wasted time” is the first of his office’s priorities moving forward.

Enough shenanigansPhil Jackson knows what he’s talking about.

In those tweets above, he's saying he sees too much intentional fouling.

Teams foul to stop layups. They foul to stop showy dunks. They foul to send warnings, they foul to please coaches, they foul because it’s the playoffs, and they foul because the game is important. They foul to stop fast breaks or to get the ball back when trailing in crunch time.

Mostly they foul because, sing it with me, it’s HoopIdea’s anti-theme: “This is the way we have always done it.”

It robs us of real basketball a dozen times a game, at least.

FIBA has long-since banned intentional fouls, and these same players do just fine without intentional fouling in the Olympics.

Jackson proposes letting the fouled team pick who shoots the free throws.

I like the idea of giving the fouled team one free throw and the ball back -- taking some of the action away from the boring free throw line while reducing the benefit to the fouling team, which would no longer get the ball back.

Another thought is to simply let the fouled team choose, with every foul, whether it wants free throws or the ball, which would take almost all intentional fouls out of the game

One of the big opportunities for the league now, however, is to give key officials the best possible information about what's actually happening on the court, specifically with real-time high-def video. Fans have it at home and increasingly in the arena. And the league has it, if it wants it.

"We're actually even toying with the notion," Stern divulged before Game 1 in Miami, "of whether replay can be done [by] offsite review, the way it's done in the NHL, to relieve the burden on the referees, who are stuck in the middle of intense gametime action."

Deputy commissioner Adam Silver outlined a vision of how things might work in the future: "If you have a group of officials in a broadcast center somewhere, location could almost be anywhere in this day and age of digital media, there wouldn't be that delay which officials need to walk over, turn the monitor around, put the headphones on, call for the replays. You could have offsite officials looking at multiple monitors at once."

It also solves a key riddle: Missed calls echo in eternity, now. Flopping isn't especially new, but annoyance at it has reached a fever pitch in the DVR/YouTube era, when motivated fans know when officials are fooled. The truth can hurt, especially when the truth is the league got something blatantly wrong. There's no reason to believe refereeing has ever been better, or is better in any other league, and yet only in the past few seasons has the league been compelled to announce corrections and missed calls in the days following the game. Thanks to video, there's little point in denying it.

Video review isn't a perfect way to fix bad calls. But it's a perfect way to fix calls that are clearly bad on video. Those are the ones causing the NBA credibility problems.

That can and should happen in real time, and it makes more sense than ever. It's also a perfect avenue for the league to truly address a number of issues, including flopping. The NBA's current flopping penalties are based on video review, but with a day's delay or more. To a lot of players, flops are still a way to help a team win. Real-time video review would expose the floppers in the seconds after the flop, when a penalty would mean something.

I've always believed that NBA coaches should have an opportunity to challenge just like in the NFL. They could throw down their challenge and NOT the refs but a gang of guys in a room full of monitors would have to review the play.

This works especially in late game situations where a charge/block is always favored toward the home crowd, as well as things like goal tending and 3 second violations.